Excerpts from Paschal Beverly Randolph’s Eulis!,
and an Introduction to His Work

by Teresa Burns

Of all the magicians and esotericists associated with the nineteenth
century occult revival, few were more simultaneously flamboyant, mysterious,
villified, and popular than Paschal Beverly Randolph. His father may have
been Edmund Randolph, the slave-owning governor of Virginia who was George
Washington’s first Attorney General; or he may have been William
Beverly Randolph of the same wealthy Virginia family; or an unknown “William
Randon,” and/or a descendent of Pocahontas. His mother Flora Clark,
depending on when the story is told, may have been a Black princess from
Madagascar, a native-American, an abandoned African-American mistress
of a wealthy white man, or all of the above.[1]

Orphaned at an early age, he grew up on the streets of New York City in
the 1840s before re-emerging as part of the early American spiritualist
movement. Soon an “M.D.” appeared after his name and the spiritualist
became a physician whose specialty was sex. By the late 1860s he was “The
Rosicrucian” who wrote about magic mirrors and founded the oldest
Rosicrucian order in the United States, the Fraternitas Rosae Crucis;
by 1873, after surviving a series of personal disasters, he published The
New Mola, where he declares he will reveal the secret of the Ansairah
priesthood of Syria.

The very next year, 1874, Randolph published his most famous work, Eulis!,
which included a long treatise on “Affectional Alchemy.” The
excerpts here are all published from that work. Randolph seemed to be
trying to revive a “Brotherhood of Eulis,” styled after an
initiatory process he likened to the Eleusinian Mysteries. His final two
works, The Ansairetic Mystery and The Mysteries of Eulis,
were distributed privately, presumably to Brotherhood members, but were
published for the general public in 1997.[2]

In his tour de force intellectual history of the eighteenth and nineteenth
century occult revival in English-speaking countries, The Theosophical
Enlightenment, Joscelyn Godwin says:

Randolph’s books, taken as a whole, contain the nineteenth
century’s fullest compendium of practical magic: not the ceremonial
kind found in Barrett’s Magus, nor the Ficinian and Kabbalistic
kind compiled by Eliphas Levi, but magic presented without antique jargon
as a way for modern men and women to increase their happiness and to control
their lives. The essentials of his practical teaching are contained in
Seership, which is on the use of magic mirrors to develop clairvoyance
and other psychic powers, and in The Ansairetic Mysteries and Eulis, which
is the longest of his sexual treatises. Both books would become fundamental
documents of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor.[3]

John Patrick Deveney, in his preface to Paschal Beverly Randolph: A Nineteenth
Century Black American Spiritualist, Rosicrucian, and Sex Magician, says:

In occult circles, where his name and works continue to be known, Randolph
has become more of a myth than a man, the subject of much misinformation
and vast conspiratorial theories. From the early 1860s on he was ‘The
Rosicrucian,’ associated in the popular mind with crystal gazing,
drugs (especially hashish), secret Oriental brotherhoods, and sex. He was
infatuated with women from his earliest years, and also spent most of his
mature life trying to improve the lot of women trapped in Victorian marriages
by teaching his notions of true sexuality. Beyond this, however, and fundamentally
he was a practical occultist and a sexual magician, with a coherent and
imaginative view of the universal role of sexuality. His work stands out
strongly from the antiquarian compilations of the armchair occult theoreticians
of the era and from the secondhand platitudes of the spiritualist movement
from which he emerged. He was the forerunner of modern occultism and it
was to him more than to anyone else that the transformation of the occult
world from the 1870s through the 1890s is due.[4]

Why, then, did he wind up nearly forgotten? Certainly his race was one
reason—even while the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor used and revised
some of his writings, Madame Blavatsky and others referred to him as the
“Nigger.” Gustave Meyrink, who thought enough of Randolph to
translate one of his novels into German, used the same term. Randolph himself
said that much of what he knew was dismissed until he labeled it “Rosicrucian”:
“Early in life I discovered that the fact of my ancestry on one side,
being what they were, was an effetual estopa1 on my preferment and advancement,
usefulness and influence. I became famous, but never popular. I studied
Rosicrucianism, found it suggestive, and loved its mysticisms. So I called
myself ‘The Rosicrucian’, and gave my thought to the world as
Rosicrucian thought; and lo! the world greeted with loud applause what it
supposed had its origin and birth elsewhere than in the soul of P. B. Randolph.”[5]

Through the 1860s, Randolph was heavily involved in the Abolitionist movement;
he dedicated a book to Abraham Lincoln and was, according to some, Lincoln’s
friend. After Lincoln’s assassination he was one of those accompanying
the body west on the train, but was asked to get off because of his race.
For all of Randolph’s struggles against injustice, one might suppose
he would appear in history books only a few lines below Frederick Douglas,
and arguably Randolph was the second most well-known African American
man in the United States. Like Douglas, he was an Abolitionist; like Douglas,
he sought to improve the economic status of southern Blacks through education;
like Douglas, he spoke up for women’s rights.

The Abolitionist movement and spiritualism went hand-in-hand, so the problem
for those closest to him wasn’t Randolph’s occult beliefs.
It was that he seemed to make enemies very easily, even among the communities
he was trying to help. Also, while both men were writers, today Douglas’s
prose, in works like Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, sounds
very modern compared to that of Randolph, and most readers’ views
of race and gender today are more similar to that of Douglas. While Randolph
was a fiery anti-slavery speaker, he prose is full of whole passages discussing
the innate differences between people based on their race, nationality,
hair color, or eye color; his attitudes in these cases often seem more
similar to those of the whites who made racial slurs against him than
those of his political allies like Douglas. He is at pains to say he is
a descendent of the “Queen of Madagascar” and “not a
drop of continental African, or true Negro blood runs through me,”
though he quickly adds that it wouldn’t matter if there were.

Similarly, while Randolph’s defense of women runs throughout his
work, and while his celebration of love and sexuality as a cure for all
ills seems a revolutionary thought for white Victorians, he has very fixed
ideas about gender roles. Though he came of age in the New York spiritualism
communities where views on the spirit world were intermingled with ideas
ranging from free love, socialism, feminism, vegetarianism, natural cures,
and tax reform, he would recant spiritualism and free love by the late
1850s, after journeying through the English and French occult circles.
(Frederick Douglas, meanwhile, would be nominated by another spiritualist
feminist, Victoria Woodhull, to be her vice-presidential candidate when
she became the first woman to run for U.S. President in 1872.)

In England, as Randolph performed as a spiritualist and public trance
speaker, he says he “became acquainted with a few reputed Rosicrucians”
who included Hargrave Jennings, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Kenneth McKenzie
and others. He became interested in crystal scrying, and became the correspondent
of many others who would revive a “Rosicrucianism” based on
arcane European and English texts in ways Randolph’s never would
be. He met and for many years corresponded with Frederick Hockley, who
had his own John Dee and Edward Kelley style of scrying set-up; he befriended
Emma Harding Britten, who later formed the “Orphic Circle.”
Then Randolph went to France, where depending upon the account, he met
everyone from Eliphas Levi to Napoleon III.

Looking for a moment of the different accounts of his encounter with Levi
will show the problem with trying to piece together a history of Paschal
Beverly Randolph from the accounts of other esotericists. R.S. Clymer,
in his colorful but hard-to-swallow history entitled The Rosicrucian raternity
in America (1928), devotes many pages to Randolph’s time in France,
and informs us that during this time, “Napolean ruled over the life F
of the nation, while Levi ruled its mind. In his own right Randolph himself
was a ruler. His knowledge was frequently considered incredible for a
mortal. He was aware that the three—Napoleon, Levi, and himself—were
to meet in order to fulfill the Karma of previous incarnations.”
And indeed, says Clymer, this happens. Soon Clymer relays an amazing story
reputedly from Levi, where Levi recounts a series of accurate predictions
about his life given by Randolph, and Randolph’s vision of Levi
as Appollonius of Tyana.[6]

Unfortunately, this almost certainly never happened. Levi’s reported
evocation of Appollonius of Tyana occurred in England in 1854, while Randolph
was still in the United States.[7]

But before we dismiss all of the rest of the Randolph stories with this
one, consider the problem Randolph presents: he mixes with almost all
of the men and women associated with starting different esoteric secret
societies in the United States. He writes the only detailed book on magic
mirrors in his time period; ties scrying with sex-magic, then shifts to
another topic before anyone catches up. Most of the late nineteenth century
esoteric orders, save those he founded, don’t claim him, and its
nearly impossible to separate out what is due to racism and what is due
to Randolph’s erratic behavior or how much the first caused the
second. Most of what we have in writing is sheer gossip, most of it full
of errors. For instance, no one knows for sure why Randolph and Madame
Blavatsky developed a sudden, pointed hatred for each other. Some say
they had a telepathic connection Blavatsky detested; many recount their
“magickal duel” that supposedly caused Randolph’s death
by suicide. Writers from Meyrink to Ayton – but notably, all white
writers -- recount the ways this duel took place: usually it involves
a magickal pistol and Blavatsky turning Randolph’s “Black
Magic” back upon himself so he commits suicide. Yet in many other
places Randolph writes against “Black Magic.”

In his biography of Randolph, John Deveney recounts different versions
of this “occult duel” that supposedly led to Randolph’s
shooting himself, and says that “even in the kindest light”
many of the details must be wrong, such as reports of Blavatsky actually
“firing” the pistol from India (she was not in India until
several years after Randolph died.)[8] Meanwhile, when later HBL writing
warns against using sexual magic for power and suggests it will drive
one to delusion, one manuscript adds that Randolph’s suicide was
an example of “the calamitous consequences of imperfect initiation.”[9]

Yet beneath the swirl of personality, it is easy to see clear connections
between Randolph and those orders who are not comfortable with him. Writers
from Rene Guenon to Deveney to Godwin have suggested that one of the Hermetic
Brotherhood of Luxor’s primary antecedents was Randolph’s
“Brotherhood of Eulis.” When Randolph begins writing on love,
“affectional alchemy,” and sexual magic in the 1870s and claims
to have found the true secret of Eulis in an initiatory society in the
near East, he ads: “Many will suspect from our true name —
BROTHERHOOD OF EULIS —that we really mean “Eleusis,”
and they are not far wrong. The Eleusinian Philosophers (with whom Jesus
is reputed to have studied) were philosophers of Sex; and the Eleusinian
Mysteries were mysteries thereof.”[10] The word Eulis seems to most
likely come from Greek êôs—meaning, depending on context,
dawn, daybreak, life, the East, or even Êôs, the Goddess of
Dawn, whose name is hidden in Christian “Easter.”

The first grade of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor Order was Grade of
Eulis, and the HBL circulated Randolph’s manuscripts, even while
warning that Randolph himself was only “half-initiated.”[11] The
Brotherhood of Luxor as Blavatsky describes it, “with all its Near
Eastern echoes, appears to bear a closer resemblance to Randolph’s
Rosicrucians than it does to her own later Indian or Tibetan mahatmas.”[12]
The Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor’s close resemblance to the Hermetic
Brotherhood of Light has been noted by many; because of this, and because
of OTO co-founder Karl Kellner’s association with the Hermetic Brotherhood
of Light, Francis King suggests that the most “immediate source”
of Kellner’s rituals seems to have been a group of European followers
of the American occultist P.B. Randolph.”[13]

Having Randolph’s “Mysteries of Eulis,” rather than
a collection of antiquarian texts, as one of the bases of revived Rosicrucianism,
calls many of Rosicrucianism’s very definitions into question. If
Paschal Beverly Randolph was indeed the "Supreme Grand Master"
of the Rosicrucian Order, as he and later Clymer said he was, doesn’t
that make Rosicrucianism “descend” from the Eleusian, or Anserietic,
or some other Mysteries, rather than from a mystical Christian Rosenkreutz
or three European manifestos. . . or does his Rosicrucianism “descend”
from anything in the physical world at all? The argument is most bizarely
illustrated by the early twentieth century battles between the two main
American Rosicrucian groups, headed by H. Spencer Lewis and Reuben Swinburne
Clymer. Clymer, as we’ve seen, considers Randolph the Supreme Grand
Master, and attacks Lewis’s Rosicrucians for, among other things,
their connection to the O.T.O. Meanwhile the Societas Rosicrucian in Anglia,
many of whose early members were one-time Randolph correspondents, stays
conspicuously silent, though its one-time head, Golden Dawn co-founder
W.W. Westcott, moved in the same circles as Mackenzie, Hockley, Yarker,
and of course, Randolph. The only surviving copy of Randolph’s Mysteries
of Eulis comes from Jonathan Yarker.

Where does “The Rosicrucian” say about the origin of his Order?
Here is Randolph’s answer, from the “Affectional Alchemy”
section of Eulis!:

I am induced to say thus much in order to disabuse the public mind
relative to Rosicrucianism, which is but one of our outer doors—and
which was not originated by Christian Rosencrux; but merely revived, and
replanted in Europe by him subsequent to his return from oriental lands,
whither, like myself and hundreds of others, he went for initiation.

The Rosicrucian system is, and never was other else than a door
to the ineffable Grand Temple of Eulis.[14]

Randolph, PB 1873, The New Mola! The secret of mediumship; a hand
book of white magic, magnetism and clairvoyance. The new doctrine of mixed
identities! Rules for obtaining the phenomena, and the celebrated rules
of Asgill, a physician's legacy, and the Ansairetic mystery, P.B.
Randolph, Publisher, Toledo, OH.

Randolph, PB 1869, Love and its hidden history. A book for man, woman,
wives, husbands, and for the loving and the unloved .. 4th ed. entirely
rewritten edn, W. White and Co, Boston, MA.

Randolph, PB & Clymer, RS 1930, Seership, guide to soul sight;
a practical guide for those who aspire to develop the vision of the soul;
the magic mirror and how to use it, The Confederation of Initiates,
Quakertown, PA.

Randolph, PB & Clymer, RS 1930, Eulis! Affectional alchemy; the
history of love: its wondrous magic, chemistry, rules, laws, moods, modes
and rationale. Being the third revelation of soul and sex and a reply
to "Why is man immortal?", The Confederation of Initiates,
Quakertown, PA.

Scarborough, S. 2001, "The Influence of Egypt on the Modern Western
Mystery Tradition: The Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor", Journal
of the Western Mystery Tradition, vol. 1, no. Autumnal Equinox 2001.
Available: http://www.jwmt.org/v1n1/influence.html.